Thanks to the Supreme Court, Traffic Stops Can Become a Gamble Between Life and Death

Although Rodriguez may have resolved traffic-stop length of time, it didn’t address the much more consequential traffic-stop reasoning the same way a less-hyped Heien v. North Carolina ruling did when it dropped last December.

Heien is like the legal Godzilla of bad cop excuses: An officer’s “mistake of law,” opined conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, can be constitutional so long as it’s all “reasonable.” In essence, it gives aggressive police officers the kind of legal elbow room they need for misconduct; or, as criminal-justice expert Lauren Kirchner explains, “[I]t essentially gives cops even more latitude than they already had, to stop whomever they want, for whatever pretext they claim.”

Heien also pretty much played backup to another little-known 1997 ruling, called Maryland v. Wilson, in which the court agreed that officers can order passengers out of cars during any traffic stop, crime or no crime. Then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote at the time that “the same weighty interest in officer safety is present regardless of whether the occupant of the stopped car is a driver or passenger.”